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Everything belongs to the workers
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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Yeah, Russell is the quintessential British liberal, hence the disdain for the working class in all his work. But he does get at the irrationality of capitalism here where the goal is simply to maximize profit with no regard for anything else. I also very much agree with your point that overwork turns people into zombies.
My view is that required work should be minimized as much as possible, and people should have the ability to choose how they spend their time.
Also agree that's precisely how religion is being used right now, hopefully that fails.
Yes, exactly, his article is steeped in contempt for work.
So much so that he considers writers and artists slackers—that sounds ridiculous to me.
Example: Jules Verne worked very intensively. His workday lasted up to 15 hours. The writer strictly adhered to the following schedule:
Start: early morning, from 4:00 AM to 5:00 AM.
Finish: late evening (around 8:00 PM). Daily output: he wrote 10 to 20 printed pages daily, which allowed him to publish several seminal novels a year.
How can you call this man a slacker, and where would he find the time to work for four hours, only to then... in his "free time" pursue creativity?
And what mark did this man leave on history?
Yes, I liked his logic, at some point I even got carried away reading it.
I saw this with my own eyes in Moscow. People on the metro are empty-eyed, detached, and always in a hurry. Such are the conditions for survival there.
I'm not sure about the 4-hour period. I doubt unemployment in more or less developed countries is 50%... it's probably not even like that in Africa.
But 6-8 hours, depending on the complexity of the job, would be normal.
My expectation is that most people would be productive even if they didn't have to work. People like making things, it's in our nature. Imagine a society where you had minimal work, but you had things like community workshops, and places where you can get together with people to build whatever you want. Like even public access to labs, factories and so on. I think we'd see incredible things getting made because people would get ideas, find like minded people and work on projects together just because they find them interesting. We actually see this happen with software and the whole open source movement already. Plenty of people write large software projects just because they find it interesting, they don't make any money off them, and the goal is purely to make something interesting. The reason it works for software is because anybody with a laptop can do it, but I think it would work exactly the same for building physical things if tools were readily available.
This can only be possible when AI is channeled in the right direction. AI should free people from work, not so they become unemployed, as would happen under capitalism, but so they have more time for creativity.
I think more attention should be paid to childhood education, so that children can be instilled with a passion for something sublime from an early age. How can you instill anything in a child today if all they see is profit?
The education system needs to be completely overhauled—that's where we need to start.
By the way, Stalin personally edited the first Soviet history textbook for schoolchildren. He also placed great emphasis on educating young people.
As that liberal philosopher who fears work said, it won't work! First education, then a creature—not the other way around. And studying is hard work, so you can't just slack off and become Lomonosov. We need an educational foundation for that. Therefore, from early childhood, children must work; they must become accustomed to work in order to achieve real results in the future. They also need an incentive to do so, and it's best if it's not money, but high ideals, as was the case in the USSR, the most educated and well-read country in the world. I've already experienced this firsthand: the horizons of a Westerner are much narrower than those of someone raised in the USSR. In the USSR, creative people were trained from school, while in the West, they produce narrow specialists who don't need anything beyond their specialty. They don't need critical thinking, for whom life is a chain of simple algorithms.
I understand everything here because I experienced it myself, with my son.
The attraction to computer programs lies in the fact that a child, as soon as they begin to understand, immediately becomes passionately fascinated with computers. There comes a time when the child gets bored with computer games and wants to get something more from the computer, but the computer still fascinates them as much as ever. If your father is a millionaire, at this point you can turn into Bill Gates or Elon Musk.
But I would slightly modify your concept of the new world. It's not about people having free access to production facilities or laboratories, but about computer simulators of various processes in schools.
A cultural revolution in society is needed.
Every form of automation is turned against the worker under capitalism. AI will be no different here, and it might accelerate the collapse of the whole system.
And agree that education needs to change significantly at this point. A lot of education focuses on rote memorization, but what's really important now is the ability to integrate the available information, evaluate it, and make decisions. Basically, applying dialectical thinking to the world. Also very much agree that USSR education was far better and broader. Becoming an intellectual was basically seen as the way to move up in society. In the west it's just about making money which creates a very narrow and selfish horizon for people.
Teaching kids to experiment using computers in school is actually a really good idea. Once they develop the mindset it's applicable everywhere, and easily transfers to working with the physical world too.
I do think we'll need to restructure society in significant ways in the near future because technology is outpacing our existing social norms. Unfortunately these kinds of upheavals tend to be highly volatile socially.